When a female lays an egg in a nest box, does the male have to be alive at time of egg-laying, or at the time of hatching, for the eggs to be fertile? i.e,. Can I kill my turkey gobblers once the females have laid their eggs and still get turkey poults out of it?
Will a M flag(melt) still function, when an (item) is Dumped and then Unforbid, like with DFHack's Autodump? Or must the M flag be reissued on each and every item, which was Dumped and then Unforbid? Just curious, because these dorfs are getting a large backup in melt jobs, in this particular fortress.
My suggestion: Make a dump zone in a 3x3 room, surrounding a hole in the center of the room. The hole goes down to the z-level below, where a similar 3x3 room with a raising bridge serves to atom-smash any unwanted items. Make sure that is your only garbage dump. Have doors on both rooms. Designate everything you want to either dump or melt down for dumping (for example--disarming caged prisoners). When the dwarves have finished dumping your items, lock the door to the top room (this is important, or they'll find one last sock to throw down and crack their skulls!), and reclaim everything in the bottom room. Mass-designate all of it for dumping, then mass-designate all of it for melting. This will mark all the metal items for "Melt", and all the non-metal items for "Dump", but your dwarves won't dump the non-metal items because they can't get to the dump zone. Now you can melt everything down. Once your dwarves are done melting things down, you can atom-smash the rest.
To make this system safer or allow for more than one dump zone in your fortress, you can put the two rooms above each other one z-level apart and channel out the middle level between them. On the empty middle space, you put a retracting drawbridge and keep it retracted most of the time. That way you don't have to lock the top room when you sort your trash; instead, you pull the retracting bridge lever, so that all the dumped items land on the bridge on the middle level. When you do the designation, they will start getting things to melt or dump, and when they dump the non-metallic trash, it should land on the drawbridge on the second level. When the bottom level is empty, you're ready to atom-smash the trash that got dumped through the hole upstairs: Lock the bottom-level door, retract the bridge on the middle level, and lower the drawbridge on the third level. The non-metallic trash falls to the bottom level and you can pull the drawbridge lever so it gets atom-smashed. This does mean your dwarves will dump each non-metal item twice, but because the items are only about six steps from the dump zone for the second time, it doesn't take too much more work.